New York DEC’s trout management strategies about to change

Remember how trout fishing used to be? Well, it’s not going to be like that anymore.

The Department of Environmental Conservation recently held a series of meetings across the state to report on its latest trout study and to seek input from anglers on what they want to see in management strategies.

The most obvious thing that came out of those gatherings, at least the one held at the State Office Building in Utica, is that change is coming in the way New York’s many trout streams will be managed.

The DEC last inaugurated a new trout management plan in 1990.

“Within two years, it will be different,” said Steve Hurst, the DEC’s chief of the Bureau of Fisheries. “It will change.”

No one really knows how, exactly. The DEC last inaugurated a new trout management plan in 1990, after an earlier three-year study. The department made another study that ended in 2015 on nine trout streams in the state, including Oriskany Creek, and will use that as the basis for developing a new approach.